Saturday, 21 December 2013

Excuse my absence. I don't know what I've been doing. Oh yes I do! Potty training Kitty. I won't go into it, but there's been a lot of washing, scrubbing, mopping etc. I'm like Hercules trying to clean the Aegean stables!! Only I am better at accessorising. I like to team skinny black jeans and my new Adelphe diamond-slice ring with eau de toddlerpiss.

But look it's nearly Christmas and though I loathe Christmas recipe pull-outs at this time of year - so confusing, so distracting - I thought I would recycle this cake that I made for my Grazia column (she said casually) and show it to you here, in case you don't read Grazia and you're looking for a mildly spiced cake to serve at some party or other.

And say Merry Christmas to you all! But, especially, to a girl called Petra I once knew a long time ago. A friend of a friend. I bumped into her husband the other day at a party, who I never recognise because he keeps changing his spectacles. At the moment he is wearing some intimidating horn-rimmed pair. "Petra reads your blog," he said. "I'm sorry I don't, I…" he floundered. It's alright, I said. You're not my demographic.

Anyway Petra is absolutely terrific, but she wasn't at the party because she was working! At Christmas!! But I think she is a lawyer and so just works and occasionally, blinking at the daylight, leaves her office to eat a sandwich and breathe some non-recycled air.

(My favourite story about lawyers, by the way, was when I emailed my friend Jamie, who is a commercial barrister, on a sunny Bank Holiday Sunday about something - I wanted to email while I remembered what it was - and I joked "As it's a sunny Bank Holiday Sunday Jamie, I expected a swift response as you will, obviously, be at work." And he fucking was!)

The thing I remember most about Petra was at a dinner party I said I liked her necklace, some really beautiful magnificent choker-y thing with all manner of swizzles and sparkles on it. "It was my grandmother's," she said. "There's an extra bit you can fit on it," she said, describing a hook and eye in the air with her hands, "that makes it even bigger."I just stared at her, boggling at the poshness of it all - I thought she was going to say she got it at Accessorize.

Thinking about Petra made me a bit sad. There are all these people, I think, old friends, who read this blog but I don't see them or speak to them. Then it turns out they've been there all the time. It's possibly best this way, when I think about it. If we were together they would just have to sit there while I rattled on and on just talking about myself and telling boring stories that start off about one thing and then turn into something else and then I suddenly stare out of the window and shout "Oh look there's that fucking massive parakeet on the bird feeder again!!!" At least if you read this blog you can get up and go and make yourself a cup of tea or something. Get a bit of chocolate to sustain yourself until the pay-off.

And while you're at it make this cake why don't you.

This is a very classy cake because of the addition of cardamom, that most people are too scared to use in sweet baking because they don't want a cake that tastes like curry. But it doesn't taste like curry, it's very nice. It's like something they would make on Bake Off.

But it is absolutely huge, so only make this if you have a lot of people coming round.

Pear and Cardamom cake from The Ethicurean cookbook
Serves about 20, genuinely

315g salted butter at room temperature

315g caster sugar, plus extra for dusting

5 eggs (!!!) lightly beaten

315g ground almonds

50g plain flour

1tbsp ground cardamom

1ripe pear (I used tinned pears, which worked very well)

70g dark chocolate

Heat the oven to 170C. Line the base and sides of a 23cm springform cake tin with baking parchment

1 Beat the butter and sugar together for about five minutes, or until pale and sort of fluffy. Then add the eggs. Don't fret too much if it curdles, just beat the shit out of it with an electric whisk or whatever until it doesn't look so awful.

2 Add all the dry ingredients and mix until just combined. Fold the mixture a few times with a spatula.

3 Turn it into the tin, level the top then place in the centre of the oven and bake for 20 minutes.

4 Slice your pear thinly and break the chocolate into pieces.

5 Remove the cake from the oven. It will still be liquid. Press the chocolate pieces into the mix across the entire cake. Lay the pear slices on top ofthe cake and then sprinkle the cake with some sugar, for caramelisation and a bit of crunch.

6 Put back in the oven. The recipe said for another 40 mins but mine took another 60 mins for a skewer to come out clean. All ovens are different, alas, which is why baking is such a fucking bore.